big bird in a small cage
by Appointment
Summary: Ginny wishes to be Fred's little sister once more. Post-DH.


big bird in a small cage

"_hope is the denial of reality."_

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><p>It's odd – the way things are going now. The way clocks turn, the way wind makes the curtains in the kitchen billow, the way they all live their lives. Wishing to be trapped in memories.<p>

The littlest of them – the baby girl – she waits, lying in tall grass. She's in the field behind the house, and she says if they were to fix their gaze on the clouds moving past the summer sky, they'll realize that they've got it all wrong, that perhaps, the ground is moving, not the sky. They're floating under the sky, and if they stand up, they could just lose their balance once more, and fall back into the shards of grass.

Ginny wishes to be a child of four again, and to feel Fred's hands wrap around her waist, picking her up and holding her above his head – _you're flying, Gin! You're really flying!_ – and she wishes for his crazy stories to grace her ears once more, George picking up the last bits of his sentence, and vice versa. Ginny misses her brother, and the twin he took with him. Ginny misses laughter, and most of all, Ginny misses herself.

Everything is broken.

She wonders when everybody will notice that they're also mistaken about grandfather clocks that were never from grandfathers, and that clocks don't tick forwards, but everybody is moving in the wrong direction. She wonders if her and her brothers were too loud when they were playing, so the clock caught them. They should have just held their breath and peeked from behind the musty living room armchair, because perhaps then, the clock might have missed them, and the world would have been spinning in the opposite direction – a direction Fred would have been able to follow.

It's only right to wonder why everything has become hollow.

She drags herself home, and onto the couch, falling asleep almost instantly, as if struck over the head. She dreams, then wakes, hours passing by like puffs of wind. She lays there, her eyes connecting with the ceiling. She tries hard to hear the sound of quiet laughter and explosions upstairs, and she sniffs hard to smell gunpowder. There is nothing. She creeps upstairs, missing all the steps that squeak and moan and pushes a familiar monogrammed door open, and she wants the room to be illuminated by happiness and a small fire that's trying to be put out.

It's not what she sees.

The bed on the right is empty and sheets are a mess, the way he had left it only weeks ago. She wonders why he isn't sleeping in it, and she wonders why Fred can't just come home. The bed on the other side of the room is occupied – but only by a body, of course. George wasn't George anymore. Nobody seemed to be anybody. She remembers when she would creep downstairs for cookies and milk, just a little too late at night, and would be disappointed that the twins had already eaten them, but it wouldn't be so bad, because Fred would always give Ginny the one he was about to finish. It wasn't so bad. Now it was. There were cookies left uneaten, and it was ghostly. She wants to sit at the table with her older brother again, and sneak around ever so carefully, because Mum and Dad were still catching some zzz's, and they weren't about to risk a scolding – not for cookies. Ginny wonders when Fred will come home and finish off the box.

She walks back outside, feeling the need to lie back in the ticklish grass, because everything is wrong, and it feels quite right. The night sky is full of small, sparkling craters of beauty, and it's an image you can't get anywhere else. Wind whistles through trees, and it almost sounds like a song that she might have heard when she was little. It brushes her face, and even the gentle breeze of summertime feels cold and unforgiving. She presses a familiar jumper to her skin, forcing it to warm her up. It upsets her, because Fred should be wearing it – he had forgotten it at home.

She breathes in hard, attempting to catch the scent of the sea, and with closed eyes, she finds herself knee-deep in crystal waters, her pale legs swathed by its cool swallow. Ron lies back in the shallow end of everything, and she feels like it's not too different from now. Percy reads a book, and the twins search for small creatures to populate pail-contained sand castles, being built for younger sisters. Fred drops a few onto mounds of sand, and they look up into their mum's face, cheery, with her bright red hair blowing in the summer wind like pretty, exploding stars, and Dad's somewhere talking to Bill and Charlie, and everything is beautiful.

She had argued with Fred about what color shovel she received, grains of sand between toes, and she wishes to have sand scraping the soft skin on her feet, because that would mean everything is normal once more.

Ginny breathes deeply once more, and it only hits her now that it had begun raining at some point while she was off at the beach with her three year old self and her big brothers. She stands up, not bothering to manoeuvre herself back to her home, but to the small pond, where catching tadpoles had been fun. There are no more tadpoles wriggling around in the water – it's murky now, a bit like the world itself.

"_Ew, Fred – those are gross!" _

_A little girl slaps her brother's hand away, with something squirming in his palm. He laughs. _

It's funny how time changes everything – it's funny how wrong it is. Ginny wonders what happened to Fred's tadpole.

It had most likely died. How morbid.

She's able to see her reflection in the water by wand light, and it makes her mind rush in circles.

Maybe if she had held onto his hand hard enough, she could step through to her reflection – mirrors had always looked happier – though instead of hitting the dirt and water, she could fall through, into the best world she's ever known.

A world where everything is not a mess, but where clocks turn properly, in sync with the world, and the clouds float, not the ground. A world where the Weasley's can be a family again.

Maybe if she had held onto his hand hard enough, she could hear his voice again. She could be the little girl that now only exists in memories.

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><p><strong>AN : So sad. /sniff/ Written for the Tribute to Fred Weasley Competition, with Ginny's POV/experience. It's a bit all over the place, but I feel like this is how she'd feel. She's in denial, too, if that wasn't obvious enough. :P I'm a bit odd. Written to / titled as Patrick Watson's Big Bird in a Small Cage. It's beautiful. **Anyways, I don't own that - or Harry Potter. **Leave a review, please! :) **


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